2/17/08

I have been trying my darndest to keep the remaining roster and stages of Smash Bros Brawl a secret but in thinking about what has already been announced it got me thinking. Ever since Sakurai, the director of Brawl, announced that all future updates to the Smash Bros Dojo may contain spoilers I have been keeping myself away from most of the Brawl news. But after doing some quick math in my head about the currently announced newcomers it got me wondering if I already knew almost every character.

I know the final playable roster on Melee, I've been re-playing it for the last 2 weeks now, and there are a total of 25 characters. So let's assume that every character in Melee is returning, this could deinitely be false, and we are only 10 characters away from the Brawl roster of 35. As you will see below, there could easily be more than 35 characters in Brawl, but that number could be correct so we'll continue anyway.

So with 25 characters assumed to be there already, the Melee returners, let us count the already announced newcomers.

Diddy Kong

Pit from Kid Icarus

King Dedede

Solid Snake

Sonic the Hedgehog

Olimar

Lucas

Pokemon Trainer

Wario

Ike

Meta Knight

You can see by the list above that it would already put us at 36 characters, more than the 35 I was told. So we already have 36 characters that we know of, but that was assuming that every character is returning from Melee. So let's remove the "clone" characters from the list.

Dr. Mario

Falco

Pichu

Young Link

Ganondorf

Roy

The Smash Bros Dojo hasn't officially announced any of the "clones" as playable in Brawl up to this point so it could be argued that all "clone" characters have been removed. So that would put us at 30 characters. But what about the already announced Lucas and Ike from Melee character's existing franchises. Are these characters in addition to Ness and Marth from Earthbound and Fire Emblem or are they replacements? Do we add them to make it 32 or do we keep it at 30 and call them replacements?

There are a few possible explanations for this whole roster situation. 1) There are more than 35 playable characters, 2) everyone has been announced already (highly doubtful since there were spoiler warnings), or 3) the roster is mostly different aside from a few characters here and there so nothing can be assumed about Melee returners.

One thing is certain, there should at least be a few surprises left for me when I get the game next month. I just hope they didn't get rid of Roy seeing as he was my personal favorite. And by the way, if any of you know there to be more than 35 characters in Brawl, feel free to inform me.